Quote:
Originally Posted by Kizzy
Modern life is more paranoid that's true, we are germ/stranger/danger/sun/fat phobic.
It's the hidden transfats and sugar in food that harm kids too, you just have no idea what you're eating these days.
There needs to be more transparency on food labelling.
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I agree, there's a huge amount of sugar in some products that you wouldn't even think had ANY sugar in them... and sugar is the biggest cause of obesity in the UK. In the US it's a combination of sugar (mainly high fructose corn syrup), hydrogenated fats, and various food additives that are BANNED across most of the world
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I recently saw a comparison page showing some well known branded products, with a side-by-side ingredient list of the UK and US... with additives that are banned in Europe highlighted in red on the US versions. It was just shocking. Some products contained as many as 20 "extra" ingredients in the US... and the one that really got me was... McDonalds chips! In the US, they're full of sugar (wtf??) and also something called an "anti-foaming agent". I don't even want to know.
Anyway, either way, the best way to avoid "hidden" crap in packaged food is to simply avoid it altogether and cook from raw ingredients wherever possible. We switched to a completely "ingredient-based" shopping list about 18 months ago (although we mainly cooked properly before that, anyway) and it's good to be able to say you know more or less exactly what's in food.
The problems, though;
- Our weekly budget (for 2 adults, and 2 young children) went from <£60 a week to approx. £85 a week. Pre-packed food is cheaper, no matter what people like Jamie Oliver want you to believe when trying to convince people to eat healthily. Good quality, fresh food costs.
- Both of us were cooking at a young age... I had the odd "benefit" of having a mother who was great when I was young and taught me all sorts of things with cooking, and then went off the rails when I was around 10, so at that point I was cooking for myself a lot. My partner used to cook with her grandmother a lot.
A lot of parents these days simply don't have the necessary skills to cook from scratch, they were never taught them.